I think many of us avoidants struggle with trusting our feelings and perceptions in dating and relationships.
When I was dating, my mind was filled with confused and anxious thoughts like:
“Why do I want to break up with this person? She has so many nice qualities. Why can’t I just commit?
“Is this my intuition – or my avoidance? Why don’t I know? What is wrong with me?”
“Wouldn’t I be feeling more clarity if this was the right relationship?”
This self-doubt kept me on an emotional roller coaster in my relationships for years. I craved clarity and confidence, but I had no idea how to find it. It was a horrible experience, and a painful way to live.
Through recovery over the last 10 years or so, I have managed to gain some insights around this dilemma and I thought I’d share some of them here.
First, I think it’s important to acknowledge that as avoidants, we have very good reason to be confused by relationships. Our formative experiences taught us they are both necessary and painful. We needed our caregivers, yet they hurt, exploited or invalidated us.
As adults, our body craves connection yet our nervous system senses threat and danger as intimacy approaches. No wonder we are confused.
In response to this attachment trauma, many of us learned to disassociate from our body and live in our heads, and we do pretty well with that lifestyle in general.
In relationships, though, our head does not help us very much. And that’s because our avoidance lives in our body. It lives in our nervous system.
The reason we are confused and ambivalent in relationships is that our bodies and nervous systems are confused and ambivalent. The distress in our nervous system generates the anxiety in our thinking.
When we’re stuck in our head, trying to “figure it out” and “decide,” it is a sign that we are activated and in our trauma. We trying to think our way to healing and clarity. But this is impossible.
We can only find our way to healing and clarity by feeling our feelings and trusting our bodies, our emotions, our presence — and gently leaning in the direction of connection with close others.
On a practical level, this involves a gentle process of recognizing when we are trying to think our way out of confusion and distress.
As we become more aware in the moment of when we are ruminating and isolating and withdrawing, we can bring compassion and understanding to ourselves, knowing that our nervous system is trying to doing its job: it is working to keep us safe, to protect us from being engulfed, suffocated and exploited, and to shield us from the pain and distress of intimacy.
This gentle awareness creates a space, a pause, for the rest of us to come back online. We are no longer merely reacting and living out our avoidance. We are taking it into account as we lean into more relational ways of being.
We are living from the whole of our body-mind, where a deeper and more holistic wisdom lives.
From this more balanced place, we can re-engage with our relationships and allow the process of life to provide the answers we’re seeking.
We are not so much trying to “overcome” our avoidant tendencies as to bring understanding and compassion to them as we move in the direction of working through relationship issues in and through relationships, rather than alone in our own head.
I realize this sounds abstract – and it is.
What I’m saying is, the “answers” to whether relationships will flourish or not are revealed not through rumination – but through the process of living into those relationships fully and with all of ourselves, showing up authentically, being ourselves.
They come from quality time, from pleasure, enjoyment, laughter, curiosity, and interest, from deep listening, from the authentic sharing of our fears and hopes and dreams and everything in between.
And then noticing when we have withdrawn (again) into overthinking and isolation – and leaning back into presence and showing up in trust and in faith.
Over time, we begin to understand our anxious rumination as an indicator that we have temporarily fallen back into self-protective avoidant patterns.
We recognize these moments as opportunities to bring compassion, awareness and understanding to our frayed and wounded nervous system.
We learn to relax and deepen our trust in ourselves and in the process of life.
We remember to come back into our body and show up more fully and more authentically and to bring the whole of ourselves to our life and our relationships.